Sun Cobalt Qube 3 review

Dial-on-demand connections are supported but there's no user-definable timeout counter to force the connection to be dropped after a period of inactivity, although at a guess I would say this has been hard set at around five minutes. No parameters are available for controlling ISDN B-channel usage either, and the event log provides no useful information about how and when the connection is being used. Dial-on-demand ISDN links can be notoriously expensive if not controlled and monitored carefully, and the Qube 3 doesn't offer any tools to make this job easier.

The Qube 3 provides a wide range of Web services, making it a good choice for an intranet server. Web pages can be created using any HTML editor and downloaded via FTP, and the Qube 3 supports CGI (common gateway interface) scripts. Web design gets even easier, as the Qube 3 includes the FrontPage 2000 Server Extensions so you can edit and publish your pages using Microsoft's FrontPage client application. As each user is created, the Qube 3 automatically creates a default home page for them, with administrators determining who's allowed to run CGI scripts.

Basic firewall protection is provided by NAT (network address translation), which can be strengthened by implementing packet-filtering rules. However, although the manual makes a valiant effort in explaining how to use filters, these should be used with caution. Sensibly, Sun includes a backup routine that allows the entire contents of the hard disk to be copied to another network location over SMB, FTP or NFS and this can be scheduled to run at daily, weekly or monthly intervals. System updates are easy to come by, as a BlueLinQ utility searches Sun's Web site for new software and offers to download and install them for you.

The Qube 3 can certainly provide small businesses with most of their communications requirements, although it isn't the best choice if your primary Internet connection is over an analog modem or ISDN. It does offer good Web server facilities, but it isn't as sophisticated as 3Com's Internet Server (see enterprise, issue 83, p212), which delivers the majority of these features but has better support for dial-on-demand connections and offers superior firewall protection, support for dial-in access and an integrated print server.

Author: Dave Mitchell